In 1595 Cambridge's Regius Professor of Divinity, William Whitaker, plus a majority of the Heads of Houses, was a Calvinist. The Lady Margaret Professor, Peter Baro, was not, nor were a number of other senior academics. In mid-November, after a tense summer during which the administration attempted to force an anti-Calvinist Fellow of Caius College, William Barrett, to recant his views on predestination or face dismissal, Whitaker drew up a nine-point statement of what he considered orthodoxy, which he and the President of Queens', Humphrey Tyndal, brought to Archbishop Whitgift at Lambeth Palace. After some discussion, which left five of the nine articles unchanged and the other four largely unchanged, Whitgift signed the document, thereafter known as the Lambeth Articles, on the twentieth of November, sending the two Cambridge men home rejoicing to have carried the day. Their elation proved short-lived for several reasons, among them the fact that Peter Baro, whose position regarding predestination (and the related questions of perseverance and assurance) frontally opposed Whitaker's Calvinism, declared that the articles that Whitgift signed were not univocally Calvinist but, ‘being dexterously understood’, supported his un-Calvinist view that predestination rested on divine foresight of faith, that justifying grace could be lost, and that a person therefore could never be secure of his or her own salvation.Footnote ¹ The Calvinist Heads of Houses, of course, fiercely denied Baro's reading of the Lambeth Articles, while Baro, in turn, wrote up a point-by-point explanation according to what he considered the ‘true sense of them’, a sense that ‘did not impugn any of his assertions’.Footnote ²

In 1595 Cambridge, the two sides to this controversy were Calvinist and Lutheran, Baro's position being that of Melanchthon and other prominent Lutheran divines. However, Baro's position also closely resembles one that, a decade or so later, would be labelled ‘Arminian’, with the result that the meaning and status of the Lambeth Articles became live issues in the Dutch Republic during the years leading up to the Synod of Dort.Footnote ³ Not printed in England until 1651, the Articles first came out in Amsterdam as part of Antonius Thysius' 1613 anthology, Brevis & dilucida explicatio … de electione … cui accesserunt & aliorum clariss. theologorum inclytae Cantabrigiensis Academiae … eiusdem argumenti scripta, which presented them as the official doctrine of the English Church and proof of its Calvinist purity.Footnote ⁴ Three years later a Remonstrant minister, Joannis Corvinus, responded in what must be among the worst-titled books of all time, the Responsionis ad Ioannis Bogermanni Ecclesiastiae Leovardiensis Annotationes in pietatem illustrium Ordinum Hollandiae & Westfrisiae a viro amplissimo D. Hugone Grotio vindicatam pars altera. Footnote ⁵ Against Thysius, Corvinus maintained that the Lambeth Articles had no official standing in the English Church and, moreover, could easily be taken in a non-Calvinist sense.Footnote ⁶

Whether or not the Lambeth Articles had such standing was still not known when Thomas Fuller published his Church-history of Britain in 1655. In the early eighteenth century, however, John Strype discovered the manuscript booklet stamped with Whitgift's seal which preserved the archbishop's voluminous correspondence pertaining to the 1595–6 predestinarian troubles at Cambridge,Footnote ⁷ a discovery that resolved the issue, since the volume included both Whitgift's 24 November covering letter, sent with the Articles to Cambridge, stating that they ‘must so be taken and used as their private judgments … and not as laws and decrees’, and a letter of 5 December from Robert Cecil to the archbishop informing him that the queen disliked the Articles and ‘required his Grace to suspend them’.Footnote ⁸

By contrast, whether the Lambeth Articles affirmed – and were understood by Whitgift as so affirming – a Calvinist theology of predestination has remained a truly moot question for 420 years. The currently dominant view holds that Whitgift's endorsement of Whitaker's text with only a few changes provides quite striking evidence of ‘Calvinist unanimity’ even in ‘the highest reaches of the established Church’ – Peter Lake dismissing Baro's claim that the revised text supported his position as so much spin-doctoring.Footnote ⁹ This view has a good deal to recommend it, since the Lambeth Articles certainly give the impression of being rigidly predestinarian. That was how Lord Treasurer Burghley took them when Whitaker and Tyndal, before returning to Cambridge, showed the revised version to him (and instantly learned, to their dismay, that he was not a Calvinist).Footnote ¹⁰ The Puritan spokesmen at the Hampton Court Conference sought to have the Lambeth Articles recognised as an official formulary, as did the Calvinist MPs in the 1629 parliament. John Playfere's survey of the several models of predestination on offer in the post-Reformation groups the Lambeth Articles with the hardline supralapsarianism of Beza and Perkins.Footnote ¹¹ The document, Lake concludes, served as ‘a watch word for unrelenting Calvinist orthodoxy well into the seventeenth century’.Footnote ¹²

Herein lies a mystery. It is beyond reasonable doubt that Whitgift signed the Lambeth Articles, and that in a confidential letter to the Master of Trinity, he described them as ‘undoubtedly true, and not to be denied of any sound divine’.Footnote ¹³ Yet in Whitgift's letters over the weeks leading up to the Lambeth meeting, the archbishop questions or rejects the two key tenets distinguishing Calvinist soteriology from the dominant Augustinianism of the West: the first being the double absolute decree,Footnote ¹⁴ and the second, what William Perkins called the ‘golden chain’ indissolubly linking the salvific graces – faith, justification, sanctification, perseverance – to each other and to God's eternal decree of election, and thereby making assurance possible.Footnote ¹⁵ Given Whitgift's reservations, as W. D. Sargeaunt queried in 1911, can we really be ‘asked to believe that three weeks later he gave his sanction to a manifesto which expresses the doctrines of absolute predestination in their harshest shape[?] Is this possible?’Footnote ¹⁶

Setting aside these reservations, since no one doubts but that Whitaker's original document (termed the ‘Cambridge Articles’ here) was a Calvinist manifesto, the key to the mystery (if there is a key) must be the revisions. The nature of the revisions, or even that Whitaker's text had been revised, seems to have been little known prior to 1651, when the two versions were printed side-by-side. The Lambeth Articles had a 1613 Dutch printing, as well as extensive manuscript circulation, but even the Historia prefacing all seventeenth-century versions, manuscript and print, betrays only a vague sense that some revision had occurred.Footnote ¹⁷

Modern scholarship on the revisions has not proved terribly illuminating. Moreover, their occasion has received almost no comment. The reason for this seems at once obvious and odd: namely that Whitgift's manuscript booklet on the Cambridge controversies of 1595–6, for all its extensive documentation, barely mentions the revisions. Whitgift's own letters say nothing about what happened when Whitaker and Tyndal came to Lambeth in mid-November, and his appended summary of the entire Cambridge brouhaha merely notes that ‘I delivered mine opinion of the propositions brought unto me by Dr. Whitaker: wherein some few being added, I agreed fully with them, and they with me.’Footnote ¹⁸ Only a late January letter from Cambridge's vice-chancellor to its chancellor – that is, from Dr Goad to Lord Burghley – preserved among the latter's papers, reveals that the university had sent Whitaker and Tyndal to Lambeth ‘for conference with my lord of Canterbury and other principal divines there’.Footnote ¹⁹

While it is inconceivable that Goad would have fabricated a conference with ‘other principal divines’ in writing to Burghley, whom he knew to be in close contact with Whitgift, were this the sole reference to any such meeting, the near-silence of the sources would justify the near-silence in the scholarship. A printed source, however, is far less reticent although almost totally ignored. The 1651 Articuli Lambethani, the same text that gives both the Cambridge and Lambeth Articles, also includes what appears to be a first-hand report of the conference to which Goad's letter alludes, a report that goes through the articles one by one, setting down the reasons why the ‘other principal divines’ at Lambeth decided either to retain Whitaker's language or to make changes. This remarkable text may have been overlooked in part because the English translation that came out in 1700 is often unintelligible, in part because Sargeaunt's 1911 study of the Lambeth Articles assumes that the report was written around 1651, and hence possessed no evidentiary value whatsoever.Footnote ²⁰

Sargeaunt, however, was wrong. Corvinus' 1616 Responsio paraphrases the report, at points almost verbatim, although fleshed out with additional material concerning Baro. Since all surviving versions of the reportFootnote ²¹ mention the Hampton Court Conference, it must date from after 1605; since Corvinus' version is the earliest surviving text and also the only one to identify Overall not as ‘D. Overall’ but as ‘Iohannes Overallus nunc Lichsfeldensis Episcopus’,Footnote ²² the original manuscript presumably had ‘D. Overall’, which would place the date of composition prior to Overall's 1614 elevation to the episcopate.

Fuller knew the Corvinus text, but he also dismisses it, since he found it highly unlikely that the Dutch would have privileged access to the goings-on at Lambeth Palace.Footnote ²³ Yet Corvinus himself indicates his source, remarking at one point that ‘Grotius relates that Whitaker demanded that the authorsFootnote ²⁴ of the Lambeth Articles ratify his position by giving their approval to this thesis’ (p. 563). Grotius might well have had inside information. He visited England in 1613 as part of a trade delegation, but also, unofficially, as a Remonstrant spokesman, and in this latter capacity had got to know both Lancelot Andrewes and John Overall, the latter becoming a life-long friend. The two English clerics were both senior Cambridge men, both close to Baro, both leading non-Calvinists. By 1613 Andrewes was bishop of Ely, but in 1595 he had been one of Whitgift's chaplains and one of the divines at the Lambeth meetings. It would be hard to think of two persons more likely to possess the report. One imagines that either Andrewes or Overall copied it out for Grotius, adding the additional material on Baro as he went along. Both, moreover, would have been in a position to vouch for its accuracy. All of which, taken together, makes a strong prima facie case for the report being indeed a first-hand account of some of the points made and arguments given in the course of the meetings that took place in Lambeth Palace during the third week in November of 1595.

Before further exploring authorship and provenance, the substantive issue needs attention, namely, what does the report say – and what light does it thereby shed on the Lambeth Articles?

The report prints the Cambridge article – with the corresponding Lambeth article, if different, side-by-side – followed by a brief account of why the former was either changed or allowed to stand. The reasoning remains consistent throughout: if the original wording could be understood in a non-Calvinist sense, it was retained; if, however, Whitaker's article proved inflexibly Calvinist, the consulting divines, sometimes referred to as the Lambethani, tweak the language so as to allow for an alternative reading.

To see how this worked, articles ii and viii, both of which retain Whitaker's phrasing, may be used as examples.Footnote ²⁵ The first of these states that ‘God has from all eternity predestinated some to life, and reprobated some to death’, which, if taken as absolute double predestination, would affirm the hallmark doctrine of sixteenth-century Calvinism.Footnote ²⁶ The Cambridge article, however, does not explicitly say ‘absolute’. Seizing on this presumably unintentional vagueness, the Lambethani find that the article may be understood to affirm precisely what it was meant to deny; for, they observe, ‘if by the first some be meant believers, and by the second some unbelievers … it is a very true article’. This is, of course, Melanchthon's proto-Arminian election based on foresight of faith (and reprobation on foresight of the converse) model.

Crafting a non-Calvinist reading of the eighth article required of the Lambethani a somewhat more complicated analysis. The Cambridge article held that ‘No man can come to Christ unless it be given him and unless the Father draw him; and all men are not drawn by the Father that they come to the Son.’ The Lambethani find that they can accept this wording by drawing on the Thomist distinction, which they had introduced in treating the previous article, between sufficient and efficient grace: if the Father's drawing refers to the latter – that is, to ‘that grace which is finally saving, or actually efficacious’ – then it is true, for ‘all men are not drawn by the utmost degree of force and persuasion’. None the less, sufficient grace, which would ‘lead a man to salvation, provided he do not himself put an obstacle in its way’ (although Thomas holds that, without efficacious grace, fallen man invariably doesFootnote ²⁷ ), ‘rouses the hearts and affections of all’.Footnote ²⁸ The Lambethani then conclude their discussion of article viii with an equally Thomist claim that God's drawing ‘does not take away the free nature of the will, but first makes it fit for a spiritual good, and then makes it good in itself’.Footnote ²⁹

For articles ii and v, however, the Lambethani required changes. Whitaker's version of the second article read, ‘The efficient cause of predestination is not a foresight of faith or perseverance or good works or of any other thing that is in the person predestinated; but it is the sole, absolute, and simple will of God.’ The Lambeth version added four words and altered the final clause (the changes noted in bold): ‘The moving or efficient cause of predestination to life is not a foresight of faith or perseverance or good works or of any other thing that is in the persons predestinated; but it is the sole will of God's good pleasure.’ The explanation for the first change is somewhat opaque,Footnote ³⁰ but the second two are crucial. The addition of ‘to life’ implicitly (although not necessarily) changes Whitaker's absolute double predestinarian formulationFootnote ³¹ to the asymmetrical single-predestination model, in which election is irrespective of merit (i.e., absolute), but reprobation the result of demerit. As the Lambethani explain, ‘these words to life are added because, although a foresight of infidelity and impenitency be the cause of predestination to death … yet there is no cause of predestination to life but the sole good-will and pleasure of God, according to that of St. Austin: The cause of predestination is sought for and not found, but the cause of reprobation is sought for and found too’. It is this asymmetrical model that the Thirty-Nine Articles affirm, in concert with a broad swathe of medieval theology.Footnote ³² As for the third change, the Lambethani explain that they altered Whitaker's ‘the absolute and simple will of God’ to the ‘will of God's good pleasure [voluntas beneplaciti]’ because the latter ‘is conditional, and God would have us to do well if we wish not to miss of his grace; and it has pleased God to save all men if they would believe’. The claim hearkens back to Bonaventure and Aquinas, both of whom contrast God's voluntas beneplaciti to his consequent will. According to the former, which is what God primarily wills (i.e. without respect to individual merits or demerits), he ‘would have all persons come to be saved’ (‘Deus velit omnes homines salvos fieri voluntate beneplaciti’);Footnote ³³ yet as a just judge who wishes only good to his fellow-men will none the less send a dangerous murderer to the gallows, so, Thomas explains, ‘God antecedently wills all men to be saved, but consequently wills some to be damned, as His justice exacts.’Footnote ³⁴ That is to say, in Bonaventure and Aquinas, the will of God's good pleasure does not include a decree of reprobation. However, what the Lambethani do not say, but which bears directly on the import of the rephrasing, is that the ‘will of God's good pleasure’ can be a synonym for what the Cambridge Articles term God's ‘absolute will’. In Lombard's Sentences, the contrast between the will of God's good pleasure (‘voluntas beneplaciti’) and his signified will corresponds to the Calvinist distinction between God's absolute will – his secret decree from all eternity appointing some to salvation, some to destruction – and his revealed will, according to which God does not desire the death of a sinner but would have all come to him.Footnote ³⁵ Like the articles left unchanged by the Lambethani, the revised article ii can bear both a Calvinist and non-Calvinist sense.

The change to article v, the final one to be considered here, has particular interest, because Corvinus' text of the Lambethani report includes information not in any other version: that ‘Whitgift and Andrewes openly said they could never assent to [Whitaker's phrasing] of this article.’Footnote ³⁶ The reference to Andrewes is the only direct evidence as to who took part in the Lambeth meeting. The article itself concerns falling from grace. The Cambridge version had, ‘A true, lively, and justifying faith and the sanctifying Spirit of God is neither extinguished nor lost, nor does it depart from those that have been once partakers of it, either totally or finally.’ Here the Lambethani made only a single change, substituting ‘the elect’ in place of ‘those that have been once partakers of it’ – a change that, as they point out, gives the article ‘quite … another sense’, for the original version was ‘according to Calvin's opinion’, the revised one ‘according to St. Austin's’. The former held that ‘a true and justifying faith is to be found nowhere but in the elect’, and hence the present experience of such faith held within it the promise of eternal life. This linking of election, faith and perseverance into an unbreakable golden chain was the basis of Calvinist assurance. Augustine, however, and after him virtually all of Western theology for the next millennium, had distinguished justifying faith from final perseverance: the former, as the Lambethani point out, being ‘common both to the elect and reprobate’, so that ‘a true faith … might fail and be lost too’, for it was not faith but the gift of perseverance that ‘belonged only to the elect’. Yet, as with article viii, the sense has not been unequivocally altered, since, for a Calvinist, ‘those that have been once partakers’ of justifying faith are the elect, and the elect alone; hence, on a Calvinist reading, the Cambridge and Lambeth versions say exactly the same thing. They differ in that only the Lambeth version allows for the Augustinian option.

As should by now be clear, the Lambethani's report sets out the thinking of the non-Calvinist divines at the Lambeth meeting. (Whether Calvinist theologians were also present is not known.) ‘Non-Calvinism’, however, is not a terribly informative designation, especially given that the Lambethani seem, at least most of the time, to defend a position somewhat different from the Arminianism of Corvinus, and, more significantly, from the Arminianism avant la lettre of Baro. The divergence is readily gauged by comparing the Lambethani glosses with Baro's corresponding attempt to square the wording of the Lambeth Articles with his own views, an attempt that he sent to Whitgift in January of 1596 as evidence that he had not publicly contravened the Lambeth Articles but merely interpreted them otherwise than did his Calvinist colleagues.Footnote ³⁷

Such a comparison reveals that only with respect to the first article does Baro's position coincide with that of the Lambethani report, both understanding that article in an ‘Arminian’ (or, more properly, Lutheran) sense, which makes election and reprobation alike depend on divine foresight: election on foreseen faith, reprobation on foreseen unbelief. However, the Lambethani gloss to article ii does not affirm this Arminian schema but rather a more traditional single predestination. (The contradiction between the two glosses is, of course, consistent with the Lambethani glosses being a committee report.) Moreover, whereas the Lambethani in their comments on article v break the Calvinist golden chain by decoupling justifying faith from final perseverance, thus bringing their position into line with Western theology since Augustine, Baro's gloss to the fifth article does not make the analogous point; instead, his comments on articles iv, vii and viii break the chain by allowing the possibility of resisting grace, a move that likewise makes assurance in the Calvinist sense impossible, although for Baro the uncertainty has to do with our freedom to reject God's offer of grace, not God's freedom to withhold the gift of perseverance. The Lambethani never speak of rejecting grace, but rather of ‘put[ting] an obstacle in its way’.Footnote ³⁸ Baro's insistence on the resistibility of grace derives from the Lutheran Aegidius Hunnius;Footnote ³⁹ the Lambethani's ‘obstacle’, from medieval teaching on the obex gratiae. Indeed, except in their gloss to the first article, the Lambethani's theological inclinations seem fully traditionalist rather than proto-Arminian. Single predestination, the obex gratiae, the distinction between faith and perseverance, and that between efficient and sufficient grace are all staples of medieval theology. If the two sides in the Cambridge bellum theologicum were Calvinist and Lutheran, once the conflict reached Lambeth the terms of the conflict shifted. And while Baro's ‘Lutheran’ commentary on the Lambeth Articles was a private missive of a Cambridge professor desperately, and, in the end, unsuccessfully, trying to defend his position – intellectual and institutional – to his not terribly sympathetic archbishop, the Lambethani, who probably met in the archiepiscopal palace, had their suggestions incorporated into the final version. So, in contrast to Baro, these were theologians whose views carried some weight.

Yet only some weight. For the tortured nature of several of the explanations suggests that these divines had not been given a free hand to substitute their own preferred wording in place of Whitaker's but had rather been told to fit the square peg into the round hole. That is to say, assuming (as seems reasonable) that what the Lambethani did is what Whitgift told them to do, when Whitaker and Tyndal showed up with the Cambridge Articles, Whitgift brought in some number of non-Calvinist divines to see if the hard edges of the original phrasing could be smoothed so as to be minimally acceptable to all parties. The aim was to fashion a consensus document, not by reworking Whitaker's Calvinism into a theological via media, which no one thought possible, but by introducing an element of ambiguity into the language so that it might be understood in different senses. Once both parties had declared themselves satisfied, Whitgift could say in good faith that the doctrines affirmed by the Lambeth Articles were not ‘denied of any sound divine’ – even the queen, whom Whitgift could not have mistaken for a Calvinist, being ‘persuaded of the[ir] truth’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Moreover, although Calvinists, both in England and abroad, embraced the Lambeth Articles as an open ratification of their own commitments, those with differing commitments noted the ambiguity from the beginning. Andrewes, who had taken part in the deliberations, commented with some frustration that the text was slippery enough that ‘everyone, as he stands affected or inclined, is going to wrest this or that word to support his own opinion; and, if the needed word is missing, he'll fill the gap with his own interpretation’.Footnote ⁴¹ In a 1616 speech to the Amsterdam magistrates, Grotius construed the ambiguity in a more positive light, declaring that the Lambeth Articles had been ‘drawn up in such a manner, as that both high and low men may receive them without changing their own opinions'.Footnote ⁴² Even in the 1620s, when the Calvinist reading had won the day, John Playfere, himself an Arminian, recognised that, although everyone took them in Whitaker's sense, the Articles themselves struck him as ‘so composed as they comprehend most certain truths’.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, the two leading Cambridge anti-Calvinists, Overall and Baro, must have recognised the ambiguity, since both subscribed.Footnote ⁴⁴

The authorship of the Lambeth Articles and of the subsequent report remain further mysteries, yet some reasonable conjectures can be made. Corvinus' Responsio places Andrewes at the meeting (p. 572), and Whitgift's correspondence reveals that he had earlier consulted the émigré Flemish theologian Hadrian Saravia about the Cambridge controversies. It is not without interest that both were Whitgift's chaplains, for if Whitgift were in the habit of turning to his chaplains as theological advisors, then the other Lambethani may also have belonged to that cadre. This seems likely on several grounds. For one thing, the chaplains would have been at handFootnote ⁴⁵ when Whitaker and Tyndal showed up ready to discuss the Cambridge Articles, a move that may have taken Whitgift by surprise; there is nothing in the correspondence to suggest that he knew that a theological manifesto was in the offing. But according to Sir George Paule, who was living in Lambeth Palace at the time, Whitgift's chaplains were active presences in the archiepiscopal household: residing in the palace, preaching weekly in its chapel, taking part in the ‘scholastical exercises’ of its ‘little academy’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Of the archbishop's non-Calvinist chaplains in 1595 – about half the total – there were, besides the two aforementioned, Richard Bancroft, Whitgift's successor at Canterbury; and John Buckeridge, Laud's tutor at St John's College, Oxford. Fuller, in fact, places Bancroft at the November meetings.Footnote ⁴⁷ One might add William Barlow to the list; in 1595 he was chaplain to Richard Cosin, but Cosin and Whitgift were very close, and Barlow became the archbishop's chaplain immediately following Cosin's death in 1597. Any or all of these could have taken part in the discussions at Lambeth.

The question of who wrote the account of those discussions, the account used by Corvinus and printed in the Articuli Lambethani, requires a somewhat more complex response. Since Andrewes wrote his own report on the Articles, he should probably be eliminated. One might then turn to the remaining chaplains, but another name obtrudes itself: John Overall. When Overall died in 1619, his nephew – who had been a canon at Litchfield while Overall was bishop there – copied out a little manuscript book of Overall's writings, including the Historia and the report on the Lambeth meeting, which the manuscript titles Articuli Lambethani quo sensu a theologis admissi.Footnote ⁴⁸ That alone doesn't prove that Overall wrote either the Historia or the report, but clearly his nephew found the manuscripts among Overall's papers, presumably in his hand.Footnote ⁴⁹ Grotius' information concerning the Lambeth Articles, and his copy of the report, almost certainly came either from Overall, or Overall and Andrewes together. Moreover, another early manuscript of the Historia and report – the only other known early manuscript – appears in a commonplace book of about 1620 filled with Overall's unpublished writings.Footnote ⁵⁰ Overall thus clearly had in his possession one of the very few copies of the report – and the other extant copies, as far as we know, all derive from it. This would suggest that he could well have been the author, were there not reason to believe that Overall was not at Lambeth. When Nevile, the Master of Trinity, wrote to Whitgift in early December 1595 recommending Overall for the post of Regius Professor of Divinity, Whitgift replied that he would trust Nevile's judgement on the matter, since, although he had heard worrisome rumours about Overall, he did not know the man.Footnote ⁵¹ It seems hard to imagine Whitgift would have said this had Overall taken part in the Lambeth meetings. Yet, if the report of those meetings does not contain Overall's personal recollections, it none the less remains entirely possible that it was he who set down on paper what one or more of the participants told him about the discussion.

A second clue points in the same direction, although along a somewhat complicated path. In Corvinus, both Cambridge manuscripts, and the 1651 Articuli Lambethani, a narrative giving the relevant background prefaces the account of the Lambeth discussions.Footnote ⁵² Whoever wrote the Lambethani report did not also compose this brief history,Footnote ⁵³ because the author of the latter has not seen the Cambridge Articles; he knows that Whitaker's text had undergone revision, but assumes that the Lambeth Articles' ambiguous phrasing, or what he calls their verborum tenor exquisitus, was Whitaker's own doing: a rhetorical tactic, he suspects, to induce the non-Calvinist dons to approve the Articles in the interests of peace, so that, having got all to subscribe, Whitaker could then claim that the Articles embodied pure Calvinist orthodoxy, which, as the dons’ unanimous approval attested, must be the doctrine of the Church of England.Footnote ⁵⁴ Given that the Cambridge Articles, which are not ambiguous, make this reading of Whitaker's tactics impossible, the author of the history cannot have known them, and hence cannot have either attended or composed the report on the Lambeth meetings, which centred on their revision. Yet Corvinus' Responsio introduces the Historia by claiming that its authors were not only men eminent for their learning and piety, but also eye-witnesses to the events. By contrast, he describes the Lambethani report as having been written ‘a viro quodam [by some man]’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This makes no sense. In fact, it seems backwards. And perhaps Corvinus got it backwards. If he received his information from Grotius, who, in turn, was told by Andrewes and/or Overall, the ascriptions could easily have been misremembered. For it seems far more likely that the Historia was the work of ‘some man’, while one or more of the Lambethani theologians contributed to the report, explaining the reasons for revisions that they themselves had urged. Perhaps, since Overall would have been in close proximity to the Lambeth chaplains after he became dean of Paul's in 1602, a couple of them penned it for his information, or perhaps Overall wrote up what they told him. Either scenario would explain why Overall's nephew found the text among his uncle's unpublished manuscripts.

The foregoing is, obviously, a just-so story, albeit one consistent with the surviving evidence. It has, however, focused on the events at Lambeth, ignoring Whitgift's compilation of documents relating to the Cambridge troubles, the manuscript that forms the backbone of all subsequent narratives of these events.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although this material says nothing about any Lambeth meetings in late November of 1595, its account of the archbishop's efforts to deal with the crisis during the preceding months provides strong, if indirect, support for their having taken place.

In late spring of 1595 William Barrett, a candidate for the BD and a Fellow of Caius College, preached an openly anti-Calvinist sermon to the assembled university, and less than two weeks later had to preach, from the same pulpit, the recantation written by Cambridge's Calvinist Heads of Houses. His performance failed to satisfy, and in early June the university leadership and young Barrett had each sought the archbishop's backing – the former, to have Barrett dismissed; the latter, for protection. Neither party presumably knew Whitgift's own views on predestination, since nothing that he published prior to 1595 addresses the topic.Footnote ⁵⁷ On 19 June, however, he wrote to Richard Clayton, the non-Calvinist Master of Magdalene College,Footnote ⁵⁸ spelling out his reservations as to the doctrines advanced in the recantation sermon that the Heads of Houses had composed and then commanded Barrett to preach. Some of the their positions, Whitgift writes, strike him not only as ‘contrary to the doctrine holden & professed by many sound and learned divines in the Church of England’, but also ‘which for my own part I think to be false & contrary to the Scriptures’. His principal objection was to absolute double predestination, ‘for the Scriptures are plain that God by his absolute will doth not hate and reject any man without an eye to his sin’. But Whitgift also doubted that it was impious or impermissible to hold (as Barrett did) either that ‘no one ought to be secure of his salvation’, or that the faith of believers (‘credentium fides’) or the elect (‘electorum fides’) might fail totally, albeit not finally.Footnote ⁵⁹ Since this latter position, Whitgift added, did not contravene the Thirty-Nine Articles, the issue was ‘a matter disputable and wherein learned men do and may dissent without impiety’.Footnote ⁶⁰

One of Whitgift's ‘sound and learned’ divines was almost certainly Saravia, whom Whitgift must have contacted concerning the same three issues that he raises with Clayton, since these are the issues with which Saravia's reply deals. The reply, moreover, rejects the Calvinist position on all three. Against absolute double predestination, Saravia maintains that election and reprobation stand on wholly different bases, for ‘grace, without any desert [on our part], is the cause of election’, whereas ‘the justice of God and the desert of sin are the cause of obduration’; thus, Jacob and Esau being both ‘sons of wrath’, the former's salvation was due to divine mercy alone, while the latter was simply left (‘relictus’) to pay the penalty due to the sins that God knew that the unborn Esau would commit.Footnote ⁶¹ With respect to Whitgift's second issue, Saravia comments that Scripture repeatedly warns against security, and since no person can know if he has received the gift of perseverance, security could only be unwarranted presumption.Footnote ⁶² As to the third issue, Saravia, who rarely speaks of ‘the elect’, addresses only the ‘faith of believers’, maintaining that, since true and temporary faith differ only in duration, both truly engrafting the believer into Christ, it is possible for faith to fail both totally and finally.Footnote ⁶³ The first two of Saravia's responses, it should be noted, correspond to positions upheld by the Lambethani (articles ii and vi). However, unlike Saravia, they distinguish between the faith of believers, which they agree can be both totally and finally lost, and that of the elect, which never fails either totally or finally (article v).Footnote ⁶⁴

Around the same time that Whitgift sought Saravia's opinion he also contacted the archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton. This exchange does not survive, but in a mid-summer letter to Burghley, Whitgift places Hutton (and it is the only name he specifies) among ‘the most ancient and best divines’ whose views disagree with those of the Cambridge Heads of Houses.Footnote ⁶⁵ In mid-August Whitgift wrote to Hutton again, asking his opinion on the same three issues (almost) that he had mentioned to Clayton and Saravia. Hutton wrote back on 1 October, declining to respond specifically to the matters in dispute between Barrett and the Heads, lest ‘his responding should provoke the souls of certain brethren (whom, in truth, I greatly esteem)’ – the ‘brethren’ whom he fears will take umbrage at his views being, presumably, the Heads of Houses, since Hutton would scarcely have referred to Barrett, a nonentity over thirty years his junior, as esteemed. Instead of responding to Whitgift's queries, Hutton enclosed his own manuscript treatise on election and reprobation, explaining that it would convey his ‘stance and position’ clearly enough.Footnote ⁶⁶ Since recent scholarship describes Hutton as taking a consistently Calvinist line in the 1595 controversies, the contents of his manuscript come as a surprise.Footnote ⁶⁷ With regard to Whitgift's first question, ‘Whether the will of God alone, without any respect to sin, be the cause of reprobation’,Footnote ⁶⁸ Hutton takes a position very close to the single predestinarianism of the Lambethani and Saravia: God, ‘having set, as it were, before his eyes, the human race – not as originally created, before sin, but as a single lump stained by vice and sin – of his mere mercy elected some in Christ for salvation, but left the rest, justly, in that lump of perdition'.Footnote ⁶⁹ As to Whitgift's second question – ‘whether it be either heretical or popish’ to say the elect should be certain but not secure of their salvation – Hutton's treatise provides an indirect answer: it does not mention securitas, but instead affirms that the elect can have a plerophoria spei, a fullness of hope, sufficient to make possible the practical syllogism of experimental Calvinism,Footnote ⁷⁰ yet it also notes that Augustine ‘said that no one could be secure of eternal life until this life had ended’, and that Augustine and other of the Fathers often ‘seem to commend uncertainty [dubitatio] as to our own election’.Footnote ⁷¹ Hutton's acknowledgement that the weight of patristic authority opposed Calvinist teaching on assurance means that he cannot have viewed the anti-Calvinist position as ‘heretical or popish’. Whitgift's third question for Hutton is more carefully phrased than the corresponding one in the June letter to Clayton. Dropping the confusing reference to the ‘the faith of believers', it asks whether it were heretical or popish to hold ‘that the elect can fall from faith wholly [totaliter], albeit only for a time, not forever [finaliter]’. In response Hutton, citing Augustine, affirms that the faith of the elect cannot fail either totally or finallyFootnote ⁷²  – a position that both the Cambridge Heads of Houses and that Lambethani affirm, but, as we have seen, understand differently. Hutton would seem to understand it as the Heads of Houses do, since the preceding pages of his treatise defend the golden chain thesis that faith implies election.Footnote ⁷³ Thus, on this question, as on the second, Hutton's own view coincides with the Heads, and his position on the first will become Reformed orthodoxy within a couple of decades;Footnote ⁷⁴ none the less, in 1595 Hutton in fact supports Whitgift against Cambridge's Calvinist Heads on two of the three controverted issues.

Following the November meetings at Lambeth, Whitgift wrote to both Hutton and John Young, bishop of Rochester, to get their opinion on the revised Articles. Young, who replied on Christmas Eve 1595, turned out not to have heard about the Cambridge troubles, having left the university in 1578, and replied merely that he had no objections to the Articles ‘as yet’, except perhaps to the fourth. However, the fact that Whitgift sought Young's opinion is not without significance, given Tyacke's observation that Young, like Saravia, was a ‘long-standing critic of the Calvinist theology of grace’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hutton's reply was only slightly more elaborate; on the whole, he approved, but recommended further revisions to iv, vi and vii, in all three cases in order to bring them into line with Augustine's theology of grace. Of particular interest is his comment on the sixth article, which held that one ‘endued with justifying faith’ could be ‘certain with a plerophory of faith’ of his own ‘salvation through Christ’. Quoting Augustine's De dono perseverentiae, Hutton suggests that only those ‘called according to the purpose’ (Romans viii.28) could be certain of their salvation, because ‘reprobates may indeed be called, justified, renewed by the waters of regeneration, and nonetheless fall away’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Since presumably it is impossible for anyone to know God's purpose with respect to his salvation except by the experience of calling, justification and the like salvific graces, Hutton's claim that such experience can be had by the reprobate seems to entail that certainty is not to be had in this life, which was Augustine's view, but not the one that Hutton upheld in the treatise that he had sent Whitgift just a few months earlier. This change of heart has further ramifications, for by affirming that the reprobate may truly believe, and so be justified, Hutton (again following Augustine) now breaks the golden chain at the same point as Saravia and the Lambethani, who also quote Augustine.Footnote ⁷⁷

These responses afford the vital reminder that theology too comes in fifty shades. More important, however, is the fact that Whitgift elicited them, that he sought feedback from divines of varied doctrinal persuasionsFootnote ⁷⁸  – although not, apparently, from those who shared the Heads’ undiluted Calvinism. This canvassing of opinions both before and after Whitaker and Tyndal showed up at Lambeth suggests that Whitgift's instinct, upon being presented with the Cambridge Articles, would have been to do precisely what he apparently did: namely, call on theologians whose views did not coincide with those of his visitors in order to hear their objections and see if there might be a way to meet them.

As this reconstruction implies, Whitgift's approach throughout the Cambridge controversies of 1595–6 was that of a bishop, an administrator, not a theologian. He did not ratify the Lambeth Articles because he was (or was not) a Calvinist, but because he was trying to hold a Church together. That he turned to ambiguity as a peace-keeping measure was neither unprecedented nor a pipe-dream. Calvin had used the same tactic, successfully, to negotiate the fissure between his own rather high eucharistic theology and the memorialism of Zurich: his key term for the relation of the sacramental signs to their signified, ‘exhibere’, can mean either ‘cause’ or ‘show forth’, and the Institutes’ chapter on the eucharist – as, on the Swiss side, Bullinger's Second Helvetic Confession – fluctuates between metaphoric and instrumentalist language. However, the breach between the Lutheran and Reformed Churches over the sacraments and predestination proved intractable; the 1586 Colloquy at Montbeliard, the most recent in a long string of failed attempts at rapprochement, had ended with the parties refusing even to shake hands. Its failure proved catastrophic. The theological differences between Lutheran and Reformed doctrine shattered the continental Reformation into mistrustful camps, leaving both vastly weaker vis-à-vis a resurgent Rome. Those theological differences had English counterparts, namely Whitaker and Baro; and Whitgift ended up being mightily annoyed with both over their failure to recognise the threat that their disagreement posed to the very existence of the English Church.Footnote ⁷⁹

The Lambeth Articles do not embody a non-existent Calvinist consensus but rather a characteristic strategy of the archbishops of Canterbury from Parker onwards for holding England's entire population within the fold of a national Church. It was a two-pronged strategy, of which only one has received much attention: namely, the enforcement of outward conformity in things indifferent. Whitgift's policy of ambiguity, however, is characteristic of its second prong, which, against the era's strong confessionalising instincts, opted for a big-tent model – not very big by later standards, but at the time too large for the comfort of many divines.Footnote ⁸⁰ As Lake comments, the Calvinist heads saw ‘true unity' as requiring ‘full acceptance of a detailed and closely defined body of doctrinal orthodoxy’, whereas Whitgift held that ‘a fairly wide area’ might be left ‘open to scholarly debate’.Footnote ⁸¹ Laud and Buckeridge would make the same point nearly a half a century later during the crisis stirred up by Richard Montagu's alleged Arminianism: that doctrines not fundamental might be ‘left at more liberty for learned men to abound in their own sense, so they keep themselves peaceable and disturb not the Church’.Footnote ⁸² Whitgift's theologically diverse chaplain mix and Burghley's equally broad ecclesiastical patronage, whose recipients included both Whitaker and Baro, betray precisely such instincts,Footnote ⁸³ as, for that matter, does the unspoken power-sharing agreement at Cambridge, where, except for the years 1593–1601, the annual vice-chancellorship rotated between unaligned conformists, professed Calvinists and professed non-Calvinists, the number of vice-chancellors from each group approximating to a 2:1:1 ratio.Footnote ⁸⁴ The years 1593 to 1601 were those of Calvinist ascendency, with all the vice-chancellors coming from that cohort. Yet even during this period, centripetal forces continued to operate, as can be seen in the aftermath of the Lambeth Articles. Within days of their being signed, Whitaker had died; within the year, Baro departed. In the months that followed, his Lady Margaret chair went to the Calvinist Thomas Playfere; but Overall, Baro's strongest supporter at Cambridge, got Whitaker's Regius chair, while Whitaker's successor as Master of St John's was Richard Clayton, one of the two people to whom Whitgift wrote confidentially during the 1595–6 crisis, and someone whose maturity and judgement the archbishop trusted.Footnote ⁸⁵ (Playfere and Overall, on the other hand, stunned the 1600 Commencement with an amazing Latin-only shouting match.) Clayton's sympathies seem to have lain with Baro,Footnote ⁸⁶ but his core commitments were to the University and the English Church rather than to a theory of predestination.Footnote ⁸⁷ The outcome, that is to say, was ambiguous, and, like the Lambeth Articles, intentionally so.